Montessori Moment: Sensorial

A student matches color tablets focusing on visual discrimination.

Alongside Practical Life, the Sensorial Area is where our younger children spend much of their time in the classroom. The Sensorial materials help refine a child’s five senses, as well as develop skills such as visual discrimination, order, logic and concentration. These materials help the child classify and understand the world around them. Many children’s toys on the market have these goals in mind, but the Montessori materials are designed to specifically isolate one sensory quality at a time such as size, length, smell, texture, etc. 

The Pink Tower, a set of ten cubes ranging from ten centimeters square to one centimeter square, is certainly a Sensorial material you may recognize. There are also smelling bottles where the children match scents, baric tablets where the children match weight (using a blindfold to further isolate that sense!) and color tablets where they order colors from darkest to lightest. Plus many, many more. Each of these specific, carefully designed Sensorial materials serves as a little "door" to help children explore the world around them.